Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir

by Christopher R. Hill

  Petraeus was the first to offer reinforcements starting with his two Arab-American interpreters, who over the course of his time in Iraq had morphed into his political advisors. A few months before, one of them arrived in Baghdad unannounced to say that Petraeus had sent him to help with the election law. I told Ray: “He’s all yours. I don’t need him.” Ray didn’t need him either and put him on the next flight out. When the request came again (this time at least in advance), the political section did some due diligence and told me they wanted nothing to do with these people. I got the same reaction from Iraqis, including, amusingly, Maliki and Allawi and one of Barzani’s aides. “Finally, Maliki and Allawi agree on something!” I told Gary. When I learned that Petraeus had flown the then-retired Ryan Crocker up from Texas in a military plane to accompany him as a kind of civilian avatar for consultations in Washington on what we were doing wrong in Iraq (and Afghanistan), I looked up at the calendar on my wall to see how much more of this I needed to endure before my planned August 2010 departure. I had promised Secretary Clinton one year and now I was in extra time. I had seen a lot of micromanaging from Washington over the course of my career, but I had never seen a four-star general take an interest in staffing up junior positions in an embassy’s political section. “What do these people have on him?” was the usual question people had. Crocker was a class act about what he obviously understood were rather poor manners in second-guessing two embassies in the field (offering free advice to our colleagues in Kabul was also fast becoming a cottage industry in Washington). I sent an email to Crocker to ask for his version of what had transpired in the meetings in Washington. He responded that he had limited his own comments to his view that the State Department needed to do a better job of recruiting FSOs to multiple tours in the war zones, a point he had made before to many audiences in and out of government.

  Within a few weeks, Petraeus was on his way to Afghanistan to take over for General Stanley McChrystal.

  “That was an interesting move,” I said to Vice President Biden about Petraeus’s assignment to Kabul when Biden visited in early July 2010. As he got into the backseat of a Chevy Suburban with me I asked, “Whose was it?” He tapped his own chest with his thumb and had a look on his face that told me all I needed to know.

  With Biden again in town the “rocketeers” in the Sadr City section of Baghdad, four miles away, soon greeted him. One rocket screamed over the head of the vice president as he prepared to get out of his Chevy Suburban.

  The type and amount of fuel packed into the 107mm modified Russian weapon (which came into the hands of the Shia militia groups via Iran) varied considerably. Some rockets (like the one that flew over the vice president’s head) landed harmlessly in the river beyond. Other rockets landed on the way to the American Embassy, sometimes short, on the nearby compound belonging to the Korean embassy, which was in the line of fire from Sadr City. The Korean ambassador, Ha Tae Yun, a career diplomat, had earlier invited me over to see his modestly sized facility (he slept in the back half of his small office) and hosted me in his dining room to some of the best Korean cuisine I had ever had outside of Seoul. I turned to Chris Klein, who was sitting beside me, and commented, “Isn’t it great to be back with Koreans having great food but not having to talk about North Korea’s nuclear program?”

  The visits of the vice president were often an eventful time for the Koreans. During a briefing of foreign ambassadors a day after Biden’s visit, Ambassador Ha said, earnestly but with a Korean sense of humor that sometimes goes over the head of westerners not expecting Korean irony, “We understand that for security reasons you cannot tell us ahead of time that you have a senior official visiting, but if you could just give us just a few minutes’ warning so we have time to get into our underground shelter it would be very appreciated.”

  The vice president was indeed a frequent visitor. He had come just a few weeks before I arrived and a couple of weeks after I left in August 2010, six visits in a space of not much more than twenty months. Biden is known as someone who likes to talk, but I admired the fact that when he came to Iraq he did an awful lot of listening. We discussed the way forward, the fact that unless we wanted to create a political crisis in the summer of 2010, we were going to have a difficult time encouraging the unseating of Maliki, if that was really what people wanted. I told him that the other idea, circulating around Washington at the time among so-called Iraq experts, was that somehow President Talabani could be coaxed out of the presidency and replaced by Allawi.

  I told Vice President Biden that I could understand the logic, but that kind of radical political surgery undertaken on Iraq now, in the year 2010, made little sense. The United States continued to have much influence in this country, I told him, but picking and choosing winners (and losers) was way beyond anything we could do by then. Perhaps back in 2004 or 2005, but in 2010 Iraq was its own country with its own political system, which we would interfere with at our peril.

  Talabani remained popular in Iraq, with broad appeal that crossed sectarian lines. His ability to speak with all sides of the political equation was as unusual as it was valuable. He often kept Maliki in check when no one else would or could. He no doubt had his flaws, but for the United States to get down into the mud of Iraqi politics and force him out of the ring left me speechless. After seven years in the country we apparently had learned nothing, and forgotten nothing.

  Part of the implied justification for pushing Talabani out (apart from the expediency of making Iraqiyya happier) was that he had a friendship with the Iranian Quds Force commander, the murderous Qasim Sulaimani. It was a reminder that in Iraq, politics can be very local, as well as very personal. As mentioned earlier, when Saddam Hussein’s forces used chemical weapons in the village of Halabja, near Talabani’s home in Sulemaniyah, the Iranians had kept the border open to give refugee to the survivors of the massacre. When I visited Halabja, I never heard a negative word about Iran.

  I told the vice president that my team and I had one other idea that we had been working on for a couple of weeks, but that it too could be just another dive into another empty swimming pool (a metaphor Bob Frasure had often used while we struggled to find governance solutions in Bosnia). It was to create a new position for Allawi as the head of a powerful national security council. I told the vice president that I had asked one of our embassy lawyers, the young, imaginative, and practically minded Ben Metz, to see what could be created, with the understanding that we could not try to change the constitution. Ben looked carefully at the constitution and told Gary and me and the rest of the political section that it could be possible to create such a position that did not undermine the roles already established for the prime minister, the presidency, and the speaker of the parliament.

  We worked on it for several weeks over the course of June and July 2010. Allawi and Iraqiyya seemed interested. Maliki agreed to consider it, although I suspected he was only being cooperative from being certain in the knowledge that Allawi would not take it as long as the prime minister remained the key position (as the constitution intended). There was no getting around that situation. I increasingly believed that Maliki would eventually prevail as the next prime minister, but it was a conclusion not so much based on any groundswell of support for him, as it was on the complete lack of viable alternatives. Outside of his own State of Law coalition, he seemed to have little support among the Shia, the Kurds, and of course the Sunni for a second term. But as I told the president and the secretary in a June note, no one else seemed to have any better prospects. A few names were being floated: Adel Abd al-Mahdi (every Washington visitor’s favorite Shia leader because he spoke perfect English and for the good reason that he was educated and practical); Oil Minister Shahristani, because he seemed to have clerical support as well as being an English-speaking technocrat; Ali al-Adeeb, because he was a powerful parliamentarian; and/or Ibrahim al-Jaafari, because he had been prime minister before.

  Yet none of these putative candidates seemed to h
ave a remote chance of competing with Maliki for the position. For the United States in the summer of 2010 to be seen blackballing a leading candidate, the sitting prime minister at that, in favor of putting forward one of our dark-horse favorites, would have been completely out of step with Iraq’s growing sense of sovereignty. And yet that kind of paternalism was what a few Iraqi watchers, for whom time had frozen sometime early in the occupation, were suggesting in Washington, D.C., and at CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa, Florida.

  • • •

  As the summer wore on, Maliki, who unlike Allawi rarely left the country or even, it seemed, his office, started making progress with the other Shia and some small Sunni parties. While no one was overtly committing to him, it was clear that he was building the momentum to expand well beyond the 89 seats he already controlled. Allawi, still stuck at 91 seats, at one point met with the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in Damascus, a bizarre meeting evidently arranged for Allawi by Syrian president Bashar Assad, who (probably) had tired of Maliki and his public allegations against the Syrians for terrorist attacks in Iraq. Allawi’s meeting with Sadr didn’t lead to anything.

  In the meantime, Barzani began to soften his line with Maliki, and to say that Maliki might be an acceptable choice after all. Barzani had no interest in a Kurdish-Shia alliance that would isolate the Sunnis, but he had realized, just as I had, that there were no good alternatives to Maliki.

  In early August Barzani invited me to his hometown of Barzan, up in Kurdistan, but this time instead of hiking, the outdoor activity would be to go swimming and jet-skiing in the ice-cold Zab River. Barzani had done this once before with Zalmay Khalilzad, the Afghan-American who had served as U.S. ambassador before Ambassador Crocker. Never having been on a jet-ski before, I listened to Barzani’s instructions carefully as I got on behind him and held on for dear life. We raced up river for ten minutes, dodging menacing rocks in the water, before disembarking to float leisurely wearing our life preservers back to the starting point. The mountain water was cold and refreshing, a contrast to the summer air mercilessly heated in the midday sun.

  After four round trips, we had a feast by the side of the river. We talked nonstop about the political deadlock and about Barzani’s welcome decision to invite Maliki to his palace in Sulehaddin, above the Kurdish capital of Erbil the next day. By prearrangement, at 4 P.M. my cell phone rang and a voice, identified as “Joe,” was on the other end of the line, as in Vice President Biden. I gave the phone to Barzani, who sat down on a folding chair cupping his other ear to reduce the roar of the river. He and “Joe” had a good discussion about the importance of the next day. We knew that the upcoming meeting with Maliki would make or break the government formation.

  I said farewell to Barzani that evening outside the guesthouse. I knew it was my last visit to Kurdistan, and given that I was leaving Iraq a few days later, and my career in the Foreign Service a few days after that, I knew it was my last chance at diplomatic deal making. The odds are often stacked against these deals working out, and when they do they are sometimes short-lived, but the sense that one has done everything possible is a very good one. And better yet was the appreciation for someone like Barzani, who, unlike a visiting diplomat, has to live with the consequences that any political deal would involve. We performed our awkward hugs and kisses before I headed to the helicopter for the trip back to Baghdad.

  I met Maliki in the morning and told him I thought the road was open to a rapprochement with Barzani, provided he was willing to address Kurdish concerns about their oil contracts and previous understandings about disputed territory with Arab Iraq. Much later that day, word came from Erbil that the meeting between Maliki and Barzani had gone well. They had met over a late lunch and then gone out in front of the cameras. They pledged to work together for “inclusive” government—i.e., there would be a Sunni component as well. Now a new government seemed only a matter of time, a comforting thought, as I got ready for my departure.

  Three days later, I climbed in my last Black Hawk helicopter, strapped myself into the seat next to the window, and rose up from the embassy landing pad. We crossed out over Baghdad, its bright city lights shining in the gathering dusk. At the airport I said farewell to my security detail, now led by Ian Pavis, who had replaced Derek Dela-Cruz a couple of months before, and got onto a small plane en route to Kuwait. I slept the entire distance.

  In Washington a day later, Secretary Hillary Clinton asked to see me in between appointments. She was busy that day, and even though it was my last day in the State Department as a Foreign Service officer, I knew she had other things going. I quickly briefed her on the embassy operations, and said how pleased I was that a very good successor, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Jim Jeffrey, had been named to follow me and would be arriving in another day. I told her about my next career as dean of the Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, and thanked her for her support in allowing me to leave Baghdad and visit there in May to interview for the position. She warmly said good-bye and thanked me for my thirty-three years of service, a long time, I acknowledged. And then she asked me a question as I started walking through the outer door of her office.

  “Who could have ever thought Maliki should have a second term?”

  “Beats me,” I answered.

  • • •

  A couple of months later I was in Washington again, and this time would have the opportunity to see Dick Holbrooke, who had always seemed to be on the road when I occasionally visited Washington from Iraq. I realized I hadn’t actually seen him since early 2009, though we had talked occasionally on the phone when I was in Baghdad. I called him from a cab at the airport.

  “You’re not going to a hotel, Chris. Forget it. You’re staying with me. Kati and I have a little place in Georgetown. We can have dinner at La Chaumière—you remember, my favorite French restaurant—and walk to our townhouse from there.”

  “Okay, okay, that’s what we’ll do. See you at the restaurant when, seven, seven thirty?”

  “Would eight forty-five or nine work for you?”

  “Um, eight forty-five? Sure, Dick, whatever. See you then.”

  He walked into the restaurant at nine fifteen, smiling and claiming that he had been waiting at the bar for ten minutes.

  “I thought we were going to meet at the bar.”

  “No, Dick, we never said anything about the bar. Besides, you hardly drink.”

  “I’m going to have a glass of white wine,” he announced, changing the subject.

  “Dick, where have you been today? You look a little tired.”

  “I got in from Pakistan this morning at around four thirty A.M. It was a long trip. Then I had lots of meetings at the White House. I just came from a speech at Brookings. Strobe says “hi.” (Strobe Talbott had by this time taken the helm of the Brookings Institution.)

  He did look exhausted, perhaps from his travels that day, but he also looked a lot older than when I had last seen him before heading out to Iraq. He had clearly thrown himself into his work as the coordinator for Afghanistan-Pakistan, but the toll on him seemed enormous, albeit magnified by the fact he had just flown in from Pakistan that day and obviously needed some sleep.

  We caught up in no time, and soon realized it was midnight; Dick had actually had almost two glasses of white wine before switching to his usual green tea. I had heard that he had some health problems, including a fainting episode, but he brushed off the subject when I asked and went back to comparing notes on Iraq and Afghanistan, and on dealing with the military, his favorite subject that evening.

  “What was that weird little story about you and Odierno not getting along?” he asked. I told him it was a nasty place. Press leaks, even outright press fabrications, were the least of it. In these places, I riffed on, foreigners sometimes take on the habits of the war zone. These places often seem to bring out the worst in everybody, I explained. As for the specific story, I had no idea; I was always proud of my relationship with Odierno
, and told Holbrooke about the good times Ray and I had smoking cigars, hitting golf balls into the lake, and talking sports, and of course discussing the mission—the 24/7 experience of Iraq.

  “You’d like him. He’s a Yankee fan,” I said, recalling the time Holbrooke had called me up at 4:30 A.M. in Warsaw in 2003 to tell me the Yankees had just beaten the Red Sox and were going on to the World Series.

  “You did the same the next year,” he noted.

  We walked up to the townhouse, stopping at a drugstore to buy replacement razor blades. He had no idea what he needed and I found myself holding various packages of blades in my hand. “Do you remember the name? Maybe Gillette? Schick? Track II, or perhaps Track III?”

  We entered the darkened house. Apart from his suitcase, which had been put inside the front door at some point during the day, the place hardly looked like anyone lived there. “Sorry, I don’t have anything in the refrigerator; no coffee, either. There might be some tea somewhere.” Looking around the townhouse, I could see he had no life in that house apart from what he did at the State Department, no reading material, no apparent favorite chair. We walked up the narrow wooden staircase, where he showed me the guest room just opposite his. He couldn’t sleep and I stood at the door to his room while he lay on his bed in his clothes, talking and talking about what he was trying to do in Afghanistan. He steered clear of any Washington politics, and I didn’t want to probe about stories I had heard that he was having problems with people in the White House. After about forty-five minutes I told him I had to get some sleep, because I had to get myself off to the airport for a 7 A.M. flight. I saw a blanket over on the chair and asked if he’d like me to put it over him. “No, I’m okay,” he said,